Small Schools I: Runaway Train

As I promised last week, I will be looking at the small high school trend, using the current experience here in the Milwaukee Public Schools (where I see the oncoming train) and the Summer issue of Rethinking Schools, wherein the best school-reform magazine on the planet tackles the subject.

[A side note: I can praise Rethinking Schools up and down and back and forth, but the fact is that they are a non-profit and can't pay their employees (hi, Mike!) with my kind words. You can download the full .pdf of the issue in question for a mere $5, or you can subscribe (at the same link) for $18, $30, or $40 for one, two, or three years. If you care at all about school reform, you simply must subscribe.]

From the opening paragraphs of this issue's "From the Editors" piece, I felt like I was reading all about me:

The small schools train has left the station. In fact, it has jumped the tracks and no one is really sure where it's headed as it picks up passengers and speeds through school districts across the country.

New York City is phasing out large high schools and planning for 200 new small schools over the next five years. Chicago is planning 100. Los Angeles is converting 130 middle and high school campuses to smaller units. New Jersey is encouraging all middle and high schools in the state's 30 poorest districts to reorganize into "small learning communities" by 2008. Similar initiatives are underway in nearly every large urban district.

Including mine. Our current superintendent has a vision of shutting down most of the comprehensive high schools in town and turning them into small-school "multiplexes." As I have noted previously, I think this is a bad idea.

It's not that small schools are bad. In fact, some of the best, most innovative, and most effective schools out there are small schools, many born from the ruins of larger, failing high schools. As the editors note, "at times, small schools have served as liberated territory, sites of progressive possibility inside a bureaucratic system that is highly resistant to change." This is a good thing, no? But they continue, expressing my own worries as if reading my mind:

In other contexts, [small schools] can cream the best students and receive unfair allocations of scarce resources while creating openings for privatization, resegregation, and union busting.

Some have raised concerns about the sketchy record of small schools when it comes to serving special education students and English language learners. Evidence in some cities, such as New York and Milwaukee, suggests that small schools are reinforcing patterns of segregation by serving a lower percentage of these students, who are then clustered in the remaining larger high schools.

Others see small schools as the new "site-based management," a structural reform that rearranges the furniture, but is largely irrelevant to the core issues of teaching and learning. Still others see small schools as a vital, but by themselves insufficient, part of a progressive reform agenda along with funding equity, antiracist/multicultural curriculum, critical teaching practice, effective school and district management and leadership, and democratic community-school partnerships.

Small school reform can contain any or all of the above elements, sometimes simultaneously. To date, the most successful small schools seem to be teacher- and community-driven efforts that take root in the cracks created by the failure of large urban systems. These bottom-up small school efforts typically have histories and school cultures quite different from the "small learning communities" created by the top-down conversion or restructuring of large comprehensive high schools. [My emphasis.]

That last bit is the primary rub in my situation: The small-schools movement here in Milwaukee, spearheaded by our superintendent and a local reform organization (founded by a guy newly-elected to our school board; additional rant here), is being done almost entirely top-down. Our superintendent almost certainly looked at the research saying that small schools had better performance and happier students and teachers, and figured that it was as good a way as any to look like he was making some kind of difference.

This has come as a great surprise to the teachers being squeezed into small schools. This is a problem, as the Rethinking Schools editors note:

[M]any of the best small schools are fueled by a passionate volunteerism among committed teachers that is both heroic and at the same time problematic as a basis for sustainable, systemic reform over the long haul. In too many other places small school reform is something that's being "done to teachers," with a profound lack of respect for their experience, needs, and conditions of work. Without greater attention to the supports needed to improve teaching and learning in classrooms and to the key role teachers must play in shaping and implementing change, small school reform cannot succeed.

What I have seen here in Milwaukee, even among staffs forced into small-school "multiplexing," the teachers taking the lead in developing the small schools are the young ones. And not young ones like me--I'm barely on the downhill side of thirty but I've got eight years of experience and a master's degree. I'm talking about first, second, third-year teachers being given a blank slate to design their small schools. I don't want to imply that all young teachers are clueless (I sure was my first couple of years, but that's a different story), but there is much more to consider when putting together a school than energy and book smarts. As we have seen in this week's Journal Sentinel series, starting a good school is quite challenging.

In other words, those in the best position to design and implement small schools are, by and large, refusing to jump through the fiery hoop. Why is that? Tomorrow, I will talk some about my own motivation for wanting to stay in a comprehensive high school, in particular the one where I currently am. But I know that other veteran teachers are resistant to the idea simply because they see the small schools fad as exactly that: the latest fad. We teachers have a philosophy that we don't throw things away, since odds are good that before you retire, every fad will come back at least once. And, given how our superintendent has thrown the district into this "reform" with barely a thought, we're not very convinced that it's anything but a fad.

Anyway, I encourage you to read the rest of the "From the Editors" piece, as it will serve as a good introduction to the rest of the posts I will do this week. I also encourage you to look at these ten "Questions to Ask About Small School Reform Plans," in particular the second question, which asks about what students will be served. And then consider this table of which schools have either been pushed to multiplexing or are likely to be targeted, versus those that are not:

Not Targeted	Targeted
Bay View	Custer
Bradley Tech	Hamilton
Juneau	Madison
King	Marshall
MHS Arts	North Division
Pulaski	South Division
Riverside	Vincent
	Washington

Now consider the same table, with one addition, a particular 2004 DPI demographic datum, and draw your own conclusions:

Not Targeted	% White	Targeted	% White
Bay View	25%	Custer	3%
Bradley Tech	20%	Hamilton	47%
Juneau	17%	Madison	7%
King	28%	Marshall	5%
MHS Arts	41%	North Division	0.6%
Pulaski	22%	South Division	6%
Riverside	19%	Vincent	7%
		Washington	2%